Emilia Wright's Academic Salon — August 20th, 1893

He had not expected such treachery from an unassuming widow. This question could not be classified as anything other than treachery, in his opinion: it was a landmine. There were women out demonstrating for the vote right now, probably, and there were conservative men huddled in their parlors all over England swearing they'd never have it, and here he was in Emilia Wright's house being asked for his opinion on the matter. There were no good opinions on the matter, he knew. Whatever he said could and would be used against him in the court of public opinion. Had Oz been foolish to come here in the first place? He knew that her son had announced a bid for Minister, of course, but he'd heard they were estranged; he hadn't expected her to be the one to wield the knife and deal the death-blow to his own Ministerial ambitions. This was supposed to just be a good opportunity to rub elbows with the academically inclined and show off how intelligent he was. Now she'd asked what he thought of women's suffrage, and he felt as though he might as well throw in the towel on the whole election.

Could he get out of the conversation without providing a real answer? He'd equivocated on plenty of issues that other people had asked him about so far, giving bland pleasant answers that contained no actual policy opinions. Was it possible to do this here as well? (How many people were within earshot? He hadn't taken notice and he didn't want to look around now; it would give away that he was nervous about answering).

"One must consider the larger question," Oz said, feeling out his answer as he went and gradually finding his footing. "Who do we trust to make informed decisions about the future of our country?" This was good, he thought; a dog-whistle that would let the conservatives hear and of course we don't trust women while the liberals might hear so I'm open to the conversation, which was about as ideologically daring as he wanted to be.

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Emilia Wright

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   Aldous Crouch, Emilia Wright

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MJ is the light of my life <3

Emilia didn’t exactly go out of her way to ask Ozymandias Dempsey about his opinion on women’s right to vote. The conversation had started and he was unlucky enough to be the only ministerial candidate in their company (Jude, hopefully, wasn’t having a more aggressive version of the same conversation in another room) and Emilia had thought it interesting to ask for his opinion.

And so, she had asked: “And what do you think about women’s right to vote?”

He had given her an awfully vague answer and now Emilia wanted to probe deeper.

Women’s suffrage was one thing that she and Jude likely agreed on politically… to a certain extent. She believed it was fair and reasonable to have women of a certain age and station able to vote, but she didn’t think this ought to be extended to all women. Just like she didn’t really think that working class men were as entitled to get the vote. She was very sensitive to the poor, but she also believed that if someone had magic and remained poor, then they were doing something wrong.

In any case, Mr. Dempsey’s answer disappointed her. She’d expected better from a Dempsey, she’d found all the women in that family such intriguing personalities!

“And do you believe women capable of making informed decisions for the future of the country?” she asked in a most pleasant way. “After all, we’ve had female Ministers in the past. Certainly Evangeline Orpington and Josephina Flint has each had to make several informed decisions while in office.”

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Oz nodded seriously in response to the mention of Orpington and Flint, both of whom were formidable enough figures in the political zeitgeist that he had absolutely no interest in challenging them. (One might note, of course, that neither of them had made the decision to grant women the right to vote while they were in office — one might, but Oz wouldn't, because his whole directive at the moment was to be as minimally controversial as possible and this was certainly not the way to go about it).

"And we have female members of the Wizengamot right now," he added. It probably sounded as though he was agreeing with her, but it was still non-committal enough to pass the dogwhistle conservative test, he thought. He wasn't explicitly stating that the female members of the Wizengamot were any good, or that they ought to be there, though he was sure in terms of experience and context any of them were more qualified to make political decisions than he was.

"Some women do vote," he pointed out. None of the women in his life did, but he'd looked this up when the issue had first reared its ugly head and he knew there was a long list of requirements which, if all satisfied, allowed some women to cast votes. Probably an inconsequential number of them in the grand scheme of things, but that didn't stop some circles from complaining that the female vote had unfairly swayed an election one way or another. "So it's certainly not as though gender alone is a disqualifying factor."

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MJ is the light of my life <3

Technically it was Magnus had been invited but like with most of her more eccentric uncles, it had been fairly easy to convince him to bring her along with a promise to be on her best behavior. And so far she had been. The whole thing had been relatively mundane. Politics were brought up only fleetingly so she'd had little chance to misbehave. Instead, she'd spent most of the afternoon as intended - networking for her career after graduation. Well, at least until she'd overheard Mrs. Wright (mother of candidate Jude Wright and the female host of the academic salon) question Mr. Dempsey's views on women's rights. She'd hurriedly excused herself from her current conversation (from a partner who seemed quite relieved to be spared from the intense sixteen-year-old) and turned towards the other pair.

Mr. Demsey offered what she viewed as an appropriate level of respect for the women she considered her role models which was a point in her relatively low favor but they were almost immediately scratched back off. Some women did vote? The audacity. Sobie couldn't help but audibly scoff. As if the small handful of women who were allowed a vote weren't done solely based on a man's direct involvement - or lack of - in her life. They could vote solely if her husband passed and her eldest son was not yet of age. As soon as he turned seventeen she'd be stripped of that right like the past up - up to - nearly two decades were insignificant.

And god forbid a woman never marry. She'd never be given a chance no matter how educated and well-read she was. Even if she was doubly - triply - more so than literally any other man.

  

Once again Mr. Dempsey offered a very diplomatic answer. He would make a good politician, Emilia thought, one couldn’t be too candid if they wanted to have any success in that sphere. That was why her dear Jude would only ever be a successful politician on the streets and not the Wizengamot. He was too honest and too vocal about it.

Their conversation was gaining an audience, not surprising given that she was the hostess and he a Ministerial candidate. A young girl, one of the many Misses Valenduris scoffed at his answers and Emilia found herself giving her a smile, before turning her attention back at Mr. Dempsey.

“So, do you believe that gender is totally, or rather, should be totally irrelevant in whether someone ought to vote or not?” Emilia asked, realising that she was starting to feel a sense of delight in her Socratic taunting of him.

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   Ozymandias Dempsey

The noise of someone scoffing spiked his blood pressure. He glanced towards the source of the noise and was momentarily relieved to find it was someone inconsequential — clearly not a voter and probably not even married to one (how old was she, fourteen?) — but it was a fleeting relief. If he'd heard her, others had too. She didn't have to have a say in the actual election to be able to influence the tide of opinion in the room. A scoff from any quarter was an existential threat to his ability to weather this conversation unscathed. Emilia Wright's continued questioning was another existential threat, of course. She was like a dog with a bone on this — why couldn't she drop it? Did she have a particular vendetta against him personally? Had he been rude to her at a ball once and forgotten about it?

Unfortunately Oz had been rude to a great many people and forgotten about it, so this was entirely possible. Oh, that it should come to this — political ambitions dashed on the rocks of an old widow's grudge.

"It's a shortcut, is what it is." He hoped he didn't sound as flustered as he felt by this point. "There are individual women in our society who lack the vote, and who are more qualified to make those decisions than some of the men who have it. But voting privileges aren't adjudicated individually in our current system, and as a class — if one were to list off all the contributing factors, everything that provides one with the right context and experience to make reasonable decisions in this sphere, as a class men likely check off more of those boxes than women do, which is probably where this distinction originally came from."

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   Emilia Wright

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MJ is the light of my life <3

Emilia hadn’t been planning to lead the conversation to this stage. She didn’t even have any sort of feelings for Ozymandias Dempsey as a candidate — positive or negative. In all honesty, he wasn’t the sort of man she would first think of as a Ministerial candidate, given that he didn’t have a Ministry position. It was mostly Ministry department heads that made the run, alongside some anomalies like her son.

This spontaneously started discussion made her realise that she rather liked asking the “hard” questions, seeing the other person try and get his way out of a political suicide. Was this the sort of exhilaration that Jude felt by antagonising everyone around him? Had her son taken after her in that regard? She did enjoy academic discussions that turned into debates, it excited her to see how people would defend their positions.

Once again, Ozymandias Dempsey offered a very generic response. Emilia couldn’t help herself, as she observed: “Well put, Mr. Dempsey. You sound like you are well read in the subject of social and political sciences,” A covert accusation that he didn’t have an opinion of his own. Why? Because Emilia wanted to see how he would react and because it was rather fun. Socrates and Jude were on to something! “But what do you think about it, Mr. Dempsey, do you think that this shortcut as you say is the proper way, or perhaps a mere excuse to keep things as they are, for a group of people who benefit from it? Would you say you align yourself with that group, or you want to be the one who changes it?”

The ball was at his court again and Emilia leaned back comfortably in her chair, waiting for his answer. Oh, she felt like a teenager who had just tasted alcohol or pot for the first time.

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   Ozymandias Dempsey

Fuck. He thought that he would like to have no alignment with any group on the subject, and obviously she knew that, and yet she kept on him. The truth was that he didn't think the current system was much good at determining who ought to be in charge of the country at all — that was how they ended up with lunatics like Spavin in the Minister's Office. But if he admitted that, he wouldn't be making anyone happy. The conservatives would dismiss him outright as a dangerous progressive who wanted to change everything just for the hell of it. The suffragettes would press him for details on what he thought best to replace it. He didn't have those details. This was a complicated issue, and he was far from qualified to decide it — and why did his opinion matter so much anyway, when even if he were elected it would hardly be in his sole power to change it all up? Why couldn't this woman just leave well enough alone and let him wander off and talk about spell theory with some dusty old codger in another room?

"A shortcut is by definition never the proper way," he ground out. "I think the current system can change, should change, and will change in rather short order — whether our next Minister aligns with those advocating for change or not."

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   Emilia Wright

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MJ is the light of my life <3

At last, an answer that wasn’t entirely Swiss. It still absolved him of any responsibility, as he mentioned “the next Minister” and not explicitly himself as the one who would try to bring this social change.

She had nothing against Mr. Dempsey, but the more they spoke the more she thought that it could become dangerous to have a man like him in power. So eager he was to please everyone, that it could lead to political instability since everyone would want to get the power. Furthermore, he seemed averse to take any major decision himself, so he could easily end up the puppet Minister of someone more decisive and powerful. An ambitious Wizengamot Chief or Ministerial Secretary, perhaps. It was a lot harder to get rid of a puppet-master working from the backstage than an unpopular Minister.

“Do you suspect a large revolution is going to happen soon?” Emilia asked, leaning towards him a bit this time. “And how would you handle something like this, if you were the one elected, Mr. Dempsey?”

Oh, resign or exile himself in Paris, most likely.

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He had said change and she had heard (or willfully misinterpreted) that as revolution. He may as well have taken his political ambitions out to the garden and shot them point-blank with a pistol: they were dead when this got out. And it would get out. She may have leaned in, but of course people were still listening, and now he was going to be branded revolutionary, and he had been in the game long enough to know that revolutionaries did not win elections. Part of him wanted to say something doubly shocking at this point and at least go out with a bang rather than a whimper, assuming there was no way to salvage this. Maybe he could just glibly say that if the women of Britain rallied together to overthrow the status quo he'd let Thomasina manage it.

Actually, maybe that wasn't the worst approach. Not Thomasina specifically, of course, because he knew her well enough to know she had no interest in stepping away from the hospital and taking over the reorganization of voting rights, but letting someone else bear the brunt of the decisions might still let him pull his head back from the guillotine on this issue.

"I think revolution is the inevitable consequence when those in positions of power refuse to listen to the concerns of those they have power over. That is hardly controversial; it's an observable historical fact," he began. "So I do think that ignoring the issue entirely would lead down that road — but I would hardly suggest that a revolution is the best or only way to satisfy the underlying needs. The time for reform is now, and if our government misses the window for reform then we'll face revolution. But as regards the specifics of that reform — it would be rather hypocritical for me, having said all this, to pretend that my opinion on the issue is the only one that matters. A committee on voting reform seems like the soundest choice," he announced, feeling more confident in this path with each word.

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MJ is the light of my life <3

“A sound choice indeed,” Emilia agreed with a nod. It all depended on who made it into that committee. If it was only men who were against it, then there was no point in setting it up. Maybe the only way women would get the right to vote was if some got it by force, after all.

She had had enough with the topic, not feeling like probing in even deeper. Deciding to change the subject, she asked: “Do you believe that having a generally liberal Minister like Justin Ross and then Balthazar Urquart before him, has set the stage for an even more liberal Minister, or perhaps the masses will prefer someone more conservative this time?”

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Ozymandias let out a breath of relief. Were they really moving on from the subject? He didn't entirely trust that this question wasn't just a roundabout way to eventually spring the same trap on him as before, but at least for the moment it appeared he'd left this issue behind him.

"That is the question, isn't it? And time will tell," he said with a nod. "I think in long view, we're going to see more liberal candidates and policies favored. But our political system has so much inertia — some of it by design. Historically what you tend to see, in England or elsewhere, is that if changes are made too rapidly the system self-corrects to slow things down. Two or three forward-looking leaders, followed by a regressive one. That," he leaned in slightly as she had done earlier in the conversation, "Or things topple over into revolution. But as to where we are in that, whether there's an appetite for more change or we'll end up snapping back first, that's the sort of thing one can only speculate about until after the fact."

Was she asking to determine whether he thought her own son had a chance of winning? Oz didn't know him well, but personally didn't find it very likely; everything he had heard about him made it seem as though he spent as much or more time talking to the masses than to the voting population. Christabel would approve, no doubt, but at the end of the day (or at least at the end of the election) what really mattered was who voted for each candidate.

"What do you think about it?" he asked, and realized it was the first time in the conversation he'd asked her a question. Did that make him seem rude or self-centered? Maybe, but in fairness she hadn't left him much room for it up until now.

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MJ is the light of my life <3

Emilia nodded along as he answered her question, finding herself in agreement with what he was saying. Then, he asked for her opinion and Emilia found herself as delighted as she was when she was the one asking the questions.

“I believe that the extremes tend to come forward in periods of instability and currently, I wouldn’t say that is the case,” There was no major crisis that would have the population try to pin the blame on a group of people. There were always the social inequalities that Jude fought about but poor people had always existed, it was nothing new.

“The winner of the election will be someone from the centre. The voting population is happy to leave things as they are and if some of them would prefer a more conservative Minister, we both know they keep such sentiments hidden.” You would hardly find the Lestranges et al hexing Muggleborns in public, but everyone knew that they would never let one of their kids marry one.

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Oz considered. "You're not wrong," he allowed, to her comment about instability driving more political extremism. "But I do think the voting population as a whole has a lower threshold for "instability" than any individual might. One of the chief problems with representative government writ large is the difficulty in looking past one's own perspective," he pointed out. "And people in our situation are fairly well isolated from social instability, as I'm sure you'd agree. I don't think we can rule anything out for the upcoming election, yet."

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MJ is the light of my life <3

Emilia nodded at various points, finding sense in what Mr. Dempsey was saying. Everyone saw life in terms of their living experiences, motivated, in the end, by selfish needs. Who knew how her Jude would have ended up, if her and Michael had been different parents? He might have been running for the conservatives now.

Someone had joined the conversation and offered his perspective on the topic and the conversation went on and on.

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